"The Comic Grave: Memory, Mortality, and Mockery in Saul Bellow’s 'Mosby's Memoirs' "

Abstract

In "Mosby’s Memoirs, " memory becomes a performative space for moral self-justification—but also a deeply ironic space where the protagonist’s illusions are entombed, exposed, and even ridiculed. Through the character of Mosby, a self-aggrandizing bureaucrat-turned-memoirist, Bellow enacts a subtle dismantling of intellectual self-importance and cultural legacy. The study examines how mockery, apostrophic performance, and narrative disintegration converge in the protagonist’s self-narration, thereby reflecting Bellow’s broader philosophical concerns with mortality, spiritual decline, and the inadequacy of language to capture the soul's elusive residue. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of memory and George Steiner’s lament of the “after-speech” condition, the article positions the story as a text that both inherits and subverts the confessional tradition. It is through Mosby’s rhetorical collapse and ironic grandeur that Bellow constructs a new form of tragicomedy: one where the grave is comic not because death is mocked, but because meaning itself disintegrates under the weight of self-awareness. Ultimately, this paper argues that Bellow's story stages a late-modern meditation on the death of intellectual mastery, and with it, the decay of the self’s last stronghold—its voice.